Ex-Isle

by Peter Clines

  It drifted up and brushed against the bottom of one of the ships. He saw the sound quiver its way through the water and felt it on his ears. The clang was sharper here. He could hear the scrape, the grit of rust and barnacles and paint.

  The not-whale passed him, and he saw twin rows of square panels the size of garage doors along its side. In the dim view the glow sticks gave him, he wasn’t sure if the squares were set into the skin or raised above it.

  Another shape swelled out of the darkness, heading for him. A lump on the side of the cylinder, as wide as he was tall. Tubes and pipes jutted out from it, like massive pins skewering the lump onto the body.

  St. George sailed up to pass over the deformity and saw the swaths of paint, bright green in the light of the glow sticks, and finally realized his mistake. The whole thing was tilted almost on its side. That’s why it had confused him. He needed to get back to the surface and warn the others. And tell Zzzap. And he needed air. Being prepared had extended his time, but his chest was getting tight.

  He turned and saw teeth. A shark’s hungry grin. Nautilus slammed one of his boxing-glove fists into the side of St. George’s head.

  He sprawled back, and a few bubbles of air spun from his mouth. One of the glow sticks spun away as his fingers shifted. He clutched the other one and surged forward.

  St. George didn’t waste time with a punch. He launched himself at Nautilus and tackled the merman, driving him back through the water. Elbows landed on the hero’s shoulders. Knees slammed into his stomach. Clawed hands clapped against the sides of his head and his ears throbbed.

  It was enough for Nautilus to twist loose and slip away through the water.

  St. George shot after him, then reconsidered and headed for the surface.

  The punch hit him in the back of the head. It was strong enough to spin him in the water a bit, but not to hurt him. He spun around, swept the hair from his eyes, and a pair of thick arms wrapped across his stomach. They jerked hard against his abdomen, squeezed, and then jerked hard. Half his remaining air formed a wobbly silver balloon and whirled away.

  St. George grabbed Nautilus’s arms and focused on the spot between his shoulder blades. The ocean roared in his ears as the two of them shot up toward the surface. Nautilus tried to let go, but St. George shifted his hands and grabbed the other man’s thick wrists.

  They broke through the surface and hurtled into the night sky. They went up fifty feet, a hundred, two hundred. St. George spun in the air three times and flung Nautilus away.

  Toward the ships. He’d thrown him at one of the smaller ships. Dammit. St. George launched himself after the merman, but Nautilus crashed through the roof of one of the yachts before the hero had closed half the distance between them. Screams of alarm echoed up to him as he dropped feetfirst through the hole into the boat.

  There was an empty bar at one end of the room, and couches lined the large windows. Small lamps gave off sputtering light and fishy smoke. A trio of people crouched, all looking back and forth between the cracked floorboards and the hole in the ceiling.

  St. George looked at the trio. Two of the people had been working on the plants in the raised gardens. “Which way did he go?”

  They said nothing for a moment. Then one of the women raised a hand and pointed to a doorway past the bar.

  A few quick steps carried him across the room. The door led to a narrow hallway, but at the end he saw the light of an open hatch. Nautilus had run straight down the hall and up onto the front of the yacht.

  One leap carried St. George to the end of the hallway. Another shot him up through the hatch without touching the tall steps. He heard a whoosh of air and ducked fast enough that something sailed past his head rather than striking him. It rushed away through the air.

  Nautilus stood on the prow of the boat and growled through his shark teeth. “I told you, I don’t want to do this,” yelled the merman. “You’ve left me no choice.”

  He had one arm up over his head, moving it in a slow, heavy circle. Moonlight glinted on the spinning length of chain. The big steel shape came at him again. Nautilus leaned into his swing, St. George tried to duck, and the yacht’s anchor slammed into his shoulder.

  The impact hurled him off the ship. He caught himself before he hit the water and pushed his body back up through the air.

  Nautilus whirled the anchor around his head. It had to weigh close to a thousand pounds easy, with another five hundred pounds of chain, and he swung it one-handed like a kid spinning a shoelace. It whooshed through the air like the blades of a massive propeller.

  The chain passed and St. George lunged at Nautilus. The merman snapped the chain forward like a whip, smashing the anchor into the hero again. It would’ve crushed a normal man. Turned his rib cage to powder and pulped his insides. It slammed St. George back into the yacht’s bridge. Wood and fiberglass and glass shattered around him. He heard more screams from the people up front, and maybe some more belowdecks.

  He pushed himself out of the wreckage just in time for the anchor to rush at him. He got his hands up and caught it, grabbing hold of the shaft. A thousand pounds, easy, with a lot of momentum behind it.

  Nautilus jerked on the chain and yanked St. George off his feet. The hero sprawled forward on the yacht’s deck, but didn’t let go of the anchor. Nautilus snapped the links like a whip, and the big piece of iron thrashed in St. George’s hands. Another lash of the chain tore the anchor away.

  Then Zzzap shot down out of the sky and lit up the deck like daytime. He held up his hand, and everything went white. Nautilus roared. The anchor and chain crashed to the deck.

  St. George blinked the light from his eyes and looked around. “Where’d he go?”

  D’you like that? I remembered Deathstroke used the same trick on Aquaman once, because his eyes were made for—

  “Barry, where did he go?”

  What? He dove off the side. Launched himself right over the fishing boat and hit the water.

  “Crap. Can you see him?”

  The wraith flitted a few yards up into the sky. Zzzap’s head swiveled back and forth across the ocean. No, he said. The water makes things tough, especially with his body temperature being on the low side. He was heading away from the island, but I—

  “Dammit.”

  What’s the big deal? We’ve got him on the run.

  “He’s got a submarine!”

  Zzzap froze in the air. What did you say?!

  “He’s had a Navy submarine hidden under all the ships, and I’m pretty sure it’s got a bunch of silos across the top. He was dragging it out from under the boats when I grabbed him.” St. George looked out at the water. “I think he’s going to nuke Los Angeles to prove he’s been telling the truth.”

  SCREAMS DANCED BACK and forth across Eden as the sky darkened. Danielle looked around. The sound of clicking teeth echoed around the building. How had it gotten so loud so fast? The exes couldn’t be here already, could they?

  “Let’s go,” shouted Kennedy. She snatched up a rifle and lunged down the path toward the southern fence. Wilson, Taylor, Hancock, and Johnson were right behind her.

  Gunshots echoed down from the roof as Pierce slowed the undead advance.

  The exoskeleton looked down at Danielle. “What do I do?”

  She looked at the door into the courtyard, a panel of expanded steel that could latch shut. The tremor she’d been fighting to control got loose in her gut and churned her stomach.

  “Come on,” Gibbs told Cesar. “This is what you’re here for.” He grabbed a rifle from the rack, shoved a spare magazine in his pocket, and headed after the Unbreakables as fast as his mechanical foot would allow.

  The battlesuit looked at Danielle again. She set her jaw and managed to nod without making it look like some kind of spasm. “Go.”

  He followed after Gibbs with long, loping strides.

  “Goddamn,” said Hector.

  “You, too,” Danielle said. “They need fighters. People with experienc
e.”

  “You got more experience fighting them than me.”

  She shook her head. “Not like this. I’m no good like this.” She gestured at the courtyard. “Get everyone back here. This is the safest place. If they can’t make it here, get on a watchtower or climb a tree or find one of the garden plots that still has a fence around it.”

  He glanced at Lester, then looked at her. “What about you? You don’t look so hot.”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped. “Stop wasting time, go.”

  Hector looked at the rack of weapons, snatched up a pistol, and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans. He gave her a last look, then headed into the garden. He turned a corner and vanished behind a tall cluster of okra plants.

  Another gunshot echoed from above Danielle. And another. Was there a ladder up to the roof, or did the Unbreakables just jump? Even in their weakened state, they could probably jump.

  The roof was safe.

  She stared down the path after Hector. Then she turned and looked after Cesar. After her battlesuit.

  The bell stopped ringing. Whoever had sounded the alarm was focused on other things now.

  “Oh my God,” said Lester. “They’re inside. They’re inside the fences.”

  The clicking teeth sounded so close.

  Danielle grabbed Lester by the arm, dragged him into the courtyard, and pulled the gate shut behind her. She made a fist and stopped her hand from flipping the latch. Other people would be coming. They’d need to get in. She couldn’t lock them out.

  She moved into the main room, pushing Lester ahead of her.

  Kennedy ran along the concrete path. To her right, past the double rows of tomatoes and beans and squash, she could see what was left of the southern fence line. Pierce hadn’t been exaggerating—it had collapsed.

  No, she realized, even collapsed was too small a word. It had pretty much vanished. Almost forty feet of barrier was flat on the ground. This was pretty much the definition of catastrophic failure.

  The exes were stumbling into Eden. Over two hundred of them, easy. The only saving grace right now was that they were too mindless to run. They staggered in with halting, uneven steps, propelled by lack of resistance more than any conscious motivation.

  Kennedy dropped to one knee, swung her rifle up, and squeezed off a burst. The three rounds caught a dead man in the throat, jaw, and forehead. The ex’s head exploded and it crumpled to the ground. She thumbed the rifle’s selector and put a single shot through a zombie’s nose, then another one into a dead woman’s eye. Three exes down in less than a minute.

  A wall of exes shambled toward them. The other Unbreakables opened fire around her. Some of the undead dropped. Others tripped over the fallen. But it was such a small fraction of the horde. Barely a tenth. They needed something big to shift the odds.

  And then, right on cue, something big appeared.

  The titan charged into the crowd of exes. An icon warned Cesar how much power the charge was burning up, but he swept it aside. He needed his mind and his vision clear.

  The exoskeleton stomped forward and slammed one of its pile-driver arms into a withered dead man. The zombie exploded, spraying dried meat and bones across the pavement. Cesar punched another one, rocketing the ex’s shattered body back into the horde. He swung one of the battlesuit’s arms around and clotheslined two dead people at once. They dropped, and he stomped down on one, crushing its chest beneath steel toes.

  He looked around, and the targeting system highlighted dozens of figures. There were exes everywhere. Some of them swarmed around him. Others headed after the soldiers.

  The battlesuit’s microphones picked up the crack of bullets splitting the air, and one of the exes near him twitched and fell over. Another one spun and dropped. A third jerked its head to the side and stumbled forward, the right side of its head a mess of twisted tissue and clotted blood. A round pinged off one of the pistons in his arm and came close to crippling the exoskeleton. “Hey,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” yelled Hancock.

  Cesar turned back to the fence and swept his arm around. Three exes were hurled back toward the street, one with a crushed skull. He swung his foot forward and shattered the knees of a dead housewife, dropping the dead woman to the pavement.

  A dead man with a crooked hairpiece grabbed the battlesuit’s other arm. A gray-skinned woman with hollow cheeks wrapped withered arms around the exoskeleton’s waist. A gore-covered child tried to gnaw through the cables in the left calf. Another ex closed its bony fingers on a support strut.

  Cesar thrashed at the undead and shifted his hips. Some fell away from the battlesuit. Others lost fingers and teeth as they clung to the titan. He brushed the last few away, then slammed his fists into some others closing in on him.

  Something metal clanked under one of the suit’s toes. He glanced down and saw a crescent wrench on the pavement. It was clean and new, not rusted.

  Another gunshot echoed through the suit’s external microphone systems. A pale-skinned man with bloody teeth and a gore-covered sweatshirt tumbled back as a black crater opened up above its right eye. The body was limp before it hit the pavement, and another ex stumbled over it and pitched forward.

  In the suit’s rear camera he saw the Unbreakables form a line. Gibbs appeared on the path. His toes sparked on the concrete as he ran. He took a few steps toward the soldiers, then dropped and brought his own rifle up.

  They didn’t have any cover. The parking lot was just a big open space. It didn’t even have the concrete bumpers in the spaces that exes could trip over. The kind of place he used to skid around and pull donuts in back when he was possessing sports cars.

  What would St. George do?

  No. What would the Driver do?

  He’d get right in there and spin donuts through the crowd.

  Cesar waded deeper into the horde. The current of exes drifted after him, and even flowed backward at a few points. Every few seconds one of them would twitch in time with a rifle shot and drop to the ground. Many of them stayed down, but some of them kept crawling after the exoskeleton. A few were spun around by the force of the shot and dragged themselves toward the soldiers.

  He made his way over to the dumpsters reinforcing the big gate. Both of the bins were filled with assorted trash, scraps, and a few of the split-skull exes the old Gardener had left in piles around Eden. Cesar’s steel hands closed on the edge of a dumpster and tugged. It felt like about a ton, altogether, but he hadn’t been good at judging weights in the naked exoskeleton. He let the suit’s fingers slide down to the corner, then pulled hard.

  The dumpster swung away from what was left of the fence. It whipped around, scraping on the pavement, and the metal bin rang with impacts as it battered exes in every direction. Cesar took a step, gave himself some room, and spun it in another wide circle. Bones cracked. The dumpster plowed over some of the zombies and crushed them beneath its squealing wheels, driven on by the battlesuit’s muscles.

  Cesar spun again, aimed, and let go. Momentum carried the dumpster across the parking lot, along the fence line. It slammed through the wave of undead bodies and left a path of broken exes behind it. A few went flying, struck the ground, and then were crushed when the rolling dumpster caught up with them.

  The green box traveled almost forty feet, two-thirds of the way across the parking lot. By then dozens of collisions had bled away its speed and power. It came to rest a few yards from the big compost pile.

  The move had taken out almost fifty exes. Some were down for good. Others tried to crawl on broken limbs. A few flopped on the pavement and snapped their teeth at the air.

  Cesar looked out at the street, and the battlesuit’s targeting system overloaded in less than a second. Dead men and women staggered toward the fallen fence, drawn by the noises of fighting and gunfire and the overlapping click-click-click of hundreds and hundreds of teeth. He’d punched a good-sized hole in the horde, but it was filling up again fast.

  H
e had to get the fence up.

  Gibbs aimed down the sights, and the rifle kicked against his shoulder. An ex sprayed its brains behind it and toppled over. He re-aimed, fired, and the dead woman stumbled at the last instant. His round tore a wide strip of the ex’s scalp away and knocked its head to the side, but it kept plodding forward.

  A shriek echoed behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. Had the exes already gotten past them? Christ, had the fence failed somewhere else? If there were two breaches in the line, they were all pretty much dead.

  He saw wide eyes through the leaves in a nearby garden plot.

  His rifle was halfway around when he recognized Desi. And then he saw an older tattooed man he’d seen a few times before. And two others he sort of recognized. It was a full work crew.

  And Smith. Behind them all was Smith. Of course.

  “If you’re not fighting,” he told them, “you need to clear out. Get back to the main building.”

  The click-click-click of teeth filled the air. The dead woman had staggered forward another two yards. Black fluid oozed from the scalp wound.

  At this range, Gibbs barely had to aim. Less than fifteen feet. His first round took a baseball-sized chunk of bone and hair out of the side of the woman’s head. The next round caved in the cheek and eye socket of a near-mummified thing in a sky-blue T-shirt shambling behind the dead woman. A third round punched right between the eyes of a teenaged boy coated from nose to crotch with dried blood.

  All three exes folded to the pavement.

  The three best shots of his life, thought Gibbs. They gave him some breathing room. He glanced back at the people in the garden. “Go,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  “They’re on the path,” said Desi. “We’d need to go almost all the way to the back fence to get around them.”

  “Then do it,” Gibbs snapped. He looked back the way he’d come and saw clumsy forms moving between him and the distant main building. They were headed for other guards and other gardeners, the ones up by the Hot Zone.